When You Play the Plutocrats’ Game, They Win: On Civility and Half Measures

By Kristine Mattis

Mattis

LIKE MANY WISCONSINITES, I am feeling rather dejected after the disappointing August 9th recall elections. But unlike most of my brothers and sisters, my disappointment stems not so much from the outcome, but from the adherence to propriety and to a faith in inherently corrupt and unjust systems.

I was inspired and awed by the spontaneous and sustained uprisings in February and March and solidarity of the people of Wisconsin. Having lived numerous places throughout this country, there is no other place I would have wanted to call home at that moment. I was so proud to be among the protesters and my tendency toward negativity was suspended for a brief period. And then it ended. People went back to work (or unemployment) and though small demonstrations continued, the massive manpower and money was instead redirected toward recalling six Republican state senators and attempting to replace them with Democrats.

Though I was surprisingly impressed by the bold stand that the fourteen Democratic state senators took to protect the rights of their citizens, and though, having attended hearings in the state legislature, I have found many of these Wisconsin Democratic representatives to be supportive of the needs of the people in the state, I chose not to devote my current activism to the recall elections.

I was at the bargaining table last year when the Wisconsin state legislature and governor’s office were controlled by Democrats. Nevertheless, we state employee unions were told off the bat that any increases in any types of monetary compensation were off the table, and that our health insurance premiums would be increased. Game over. Doing anything else was too risky in “this political climate,” they said. Having worked in the U.S. House of Representatives previously, I saw firsthand the complicity and complacency of many federal Democrats, but I really had no knowledge of politics at the state level in WI. I learned quickly as, after months of negotiating, even our very crappy contracts were voted against by a couple of turncoat Democrats seeking political leverage from the incoming legion of Republicans.

In the past thirty years, state and local governments – in fact society in general – have been catering more and more to corporate interests, and consequently corporate interests have been taking over our state and our society. This has resulted in their co-opting of the only two major political parties allowed to exist in the U.S., as well as in the largest redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich in history. In real terms, massive unemployment, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and social decay has spread across America, going largely unnoticed by anyone not experiencing it, or more likely, trying their hardest to deny it. The corporate controlled media does not report it to any substantive extent. They are too busy promoting new products, gadgets and consumer distractions.

In addition to consistent tax cuts for the rich and corporations and the expenses incurred from two-plus illegal and unnecessary imperial wars, the most recent recession in 2008 – caused by the unregulated casino known as Wall Street – has caused most of the fiscal crises in the states and throughout the nation. Yet, the Wall Street bankers committed fraud, the “brilliant” Ivy-League educated economists looked blithely away as the economic system collapsed, and the government officials who should have prosecuted the thieves let the perpetrators go scot free and proceeded to blame vital public employees for the financial woes caused by the rich. They not only allowed the criminals to go away unscathed, they fed these same criminals OUR money so that they could maintain their obscene wealth. Meanwhile, all over the nation, we, who had already lost everything, were being told we had to lose MORE so that those same rich people whom we had bailed out could “save” us through their privatization of all public goods (which, of course, does nothing but fatten their pocketbooks and starve us dead).

These unspeakable acts of reverse Robin-Hood corporate socialism took place under the watch of both Democrats and Republicans. We’d all like for it to not be so, in order for us to be able to easily place blame on one side, and go to the polls to vote in the other direction, but that vote is just a half measure. It often obtains little and changes nothing.

I do not wish to blame the Democratic officials in my state, because many of them – including Rep. Tammy Baldwin, and numerous state assemblypersons and senators whom I have had the good fortune of meeting during these recent months – have proven themselves more stalwart and progressive than most. I also recognize the insidiousness of the phony “grassroots” Tea Party, their corporate sponsors, their Republican allies, and their media propaganda machine. But laying the blame for the desperate state we find ourselves in solely at the feet of the GOP is completely disingenuous. Despite the rhetoric in the media, the real conflict is not between the Democrats and the Republicans; here and throughout the world, there is not a political war but a class war – and the rich are winning by a landslide. Given that context, trying to exact change through electoral politics is futile because the system is already rigged by the plutocrats, and because if one is not willing to deviate from their system, one is bound to lose.

Many political activists working on the recall elections have been saying that we want to elect Democrats to “stop the bleeding” and then we will hold them accountable to the people. From my vantage point, I do not see bleeding; I see fatal hemorrhaging from the carotid artery that only societal change, not politics, will be able to surgically repair.

When we play the game of the plutocrats, we allow:

  • A “Citizen’s United” election in which endless corporate moneys control the outcome
  • Continuation of the false premise that Wisconsin even had a budget “crisis”
  • Media framing that “the people have spoken through their votes” (regardless of the fact that this cannot be the case in a country where corporations are considered people)
  • Domination by “middle class” in discourse, instead of discussions about poverty, racism, and severe social injustices
  • Political tricks and illegal maneuvers (see: falsification of election date on absentee ballots, consistent election irregularities in Waukesha county clerk’s office, phony robo-calls by right-wing groups, voter intimidation at polls, voter disenfranchisement through cumbersome voter ID law, etc.) going uncontested or unprosecuted
  • “Conspiracy theory” narratives to dismiss all skepticism, despite tremendous evidence of organized wrongdoings

One of the main ways we play into their game is through prevarication and civility. What should have happened, as many chanted on March 9th – the day the state Assembly illegally voted on the anti-collective bargaining bill and 7000 people immediately flooded past the gatekeepers at the capitol doors to protest – was a general strike. If our elected officials can break a law that attempts to protect the transparency of our state legislative process by pushing through a vote without due notice, then citizens should have broken a wholly unjust law that attempts to criminalize the rights of workers to not show up for work.

I’m originally from New York. New Yorkers have a justified stereotype of being rude and abrasive (often unprovoked and for no reason). By contrast, what I have found living in Wisconsin for the past two years and in the Upper Midwest for the past four, is that civility is at a premium here. As a general rule, people like to maintain decorum and do not like to complain. That can be a very nice thing, for example, when you are new in town and everyone is welcoming and nice. But it is extremely disadvantageous when one is reticent to “act out” for fear of conflict or contention.

One of the Democrats in the recall elections said in an interview that she did not like the recent changes in Wisconsin government, because things had become so divisive and people could not compromise. Given the current state of affairs, I would say that compromise is not in order. When it comes to balancing a budget by hampering or eliminating all of the social safety nets for the poor in order to enhance incentives for corporate interests, a legislator who seeks a balanced “compromise” on these unequal terms is not a legislator that any citizen needs. Likewise, a citizen who would rather retract into her (not-so) comfortable life by casting a vote rather than by challenging an unjust political and social system is not a citizen who will be victorious for her cause. Right now, I hope that Wisconsinites can realize that when battling plutocracy, one must leave one’s civility at the door. Maybe now’s the time to take a lesson from the New Yorkers; maybe now’s the time to stop playing by their rules and to be belligerent, obstinate, and uncompromising.

Kristine Mattis is PhD student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison, and a member of the Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA), the union of graduate employees. She was also previously a secondary school teacher and a member of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). www.rebelpleb.blogspot.com

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The Corporate King Memorial and The Burial of a Movement

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR columnist Jared A. Ball

The newly unveiled MLK Memorial is designed to ensure that “King be forever separated from his anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-patient work for a genuine revolution.” The great leader’s image and narrative have been walled in by the likes of “JP Morgan, Murdoch’s Direct TV, Exxon, Target and Wal-Mart – other bastions of workers’ rights and liberty.”

“The very entities against which the movement that produced King have struggled for centuries have now attached themselves to him as if to claim victory over, rather than along with, that man and that movement.”

Dr. King and the liberation movement he represents will again suffer a brutal blow this week when all are permanently entombed under the violent euphemism of “memorial.” The dedication of this $120 million stone sculpture is to be a national tribute to a man whose entire body of work was designed to destroy the very structure that now claims to honor him. It is no honor. It is a burial. The very entities against which the movement that produced King have struggled for centuries have now attached themselves to him as if to claim victory over, rather than along with, that man and that movement. This memorial should be seen as the hostile, disingenuous aggression against Dr. King that it is and should continue to be a reminder of the absolute absence of sincere change in this society.

Deborah Atwater and Sandra Herndon have written about the meaning of memorials and museums saying, in part, that they serve the “nation-state” by communicating an “official culture” whose job, “through sponsorship,” is to “retain loyalty” and the “virtue of unity.” Atwater and Herndon describe memorials as helping the state develop a “ collective American public memory” and a “shared sense of the past.” Museums and memorials become “the spaces in which that [public] memory is interpreted.” Perhaps most importantly is that memorials are said to also “give meaning to the present.” But given the vicious re-imaging King suffered before his assassination, the vitriol he withstood from a nation determined to resist the change he represented, and given the post-assassination routine destruction of his advancing radical politics, it is simply not hard to determine just what this memorial intends to convey or the present meaning it intends to define.

“It is fitting that this memorial be established while a Black president presides over the falling conditions of Black Americans and the falling bombs over African homes.”

The collective which has formed to create the memorial seems to be a marriage of the exact forces King spoke most aggressively against: White liberals, corporations and the Black petite-bourgeoisie. The “leadership” team consists of Andrew Young and two current and former executives from General Motors. Their support leadership group consists of people like, Russell Simmons, J.C. Watts and Earl Graves, but of course Tommy Hilfiger, football team owner Daniel Snyder and NBA commissioner David Stern. But better still is the “major contributor” list which consists of such leaders in the march toward peace and equality like defense contractor Boeing and the media empire Viacom. Certainly Disney and Coca-Cola have, when not producing drawn racism or supporting the assassination of laborers, been among the brightest beacons of freedom. Of course, there are others like JP Morgan, Murdoch’s Direct TV, Exxon, Target and Wal Mart – other bastions of workers’ rights and liberty. All have come together to ensure that King be forever separated from his anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-patient work for a genuine revolution.

It is fitting that this memorial is placed so as to sit “along the axis of the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials” permanently fixed between two of this nation’s greatest representatives of enslavement and anti-Blackness. It is fitting that this memorial is being established by the very segments of this society King worked strongest against and to which he offered his most biting criticism. And it is fitting that this memorial be established at a time when King’s words and deeds are least known or followed, while a Black president presides over the falling conditions of Black Americans and the falling bombs over African homes. And it is fitting that the dedication of the memorial will come 48 years after his most famous speech and 44 years after he would call his dream a “nightmare.”

For when we see the dedication ceremony and as we look upon the sculpture itself what we will see is not a true dedication to a great man, instead we will be witnessing the funeral and headstone of a movement.

For Black Agenda Radio I’m Jared Ball. On the web go to BlackAgendaReport.com [5].

Dr. Jared A. Ball is an associate professor of communication studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore and is the author of I Mix What I Like! A Mixtape Manifesto (AK Press). He can be found online at: IMIXWHATILIKE.COM [6].

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20110824_jb_bury_da_king.mp3

 

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/corporate-king-memorial-and-burial-movement

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Planetary INTEGRATIVE TRANSCENDENCE – the only viable future path for Earth

By Anthony Marr

Hail, Anna Hazare!

Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria… and now, India. These are the vanguards of a global people’s uprising poised to sweep the world.  I make this prediction due to the fact that mere “rising food prices” have deposed the long tolerated Mubarak. This is just Step #1.

Step #2 will be “food shortage”.
Step #3 will be “food outrage”
Step #4 will be “Famine”.

All these are predicted for planet Earth in the coming decades to various degrees around the world.

And what do the people rise up against? So far, it’s been corrupt and oppressive governments, the corruption and oppression of which have gone off scale. But let’s face it. All governments are corrupt and oppressive, and differ only by means and extent. The people have a certain background capacity, sometimes forced by government, to tolerate the corruption and the oppression. But it is a revolt waiting to happen. All it will take is a trigger: food prices, fuel prices, energy shortage or outrage, unemployment, inflation, empty shelves, natural disasters… to push the tolerance off limit. And these triggers are all waiting to be pulled, and who will pull them but Mother Nature herself – by means of climate change and the resulting millennium drought, which will in turn precipitate food shortage, etc., etc. Since severe climate change appears inevitable at this point, these uprisings will over the coming years envelop the world and set it on political fire.

Now, two questions arise:

1. What will happen to the national governments around the world? Will they just fall like dominoes, leaving anarchy and chaos behind? And if they fall, how much blood will be shed? And when some fall, will they start WW3 to take the whole world down with them? Can the current forms of governments, as they are, survive through this global political upheaval? If not, and faced with “change or die”, what must they change into?

2. Will the global uprising have a direction, a goal, an aim, a vision? Will it be just “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”? Will it be destruction without construction? And if they are to construct, as they must, what must it be? What will it end up being? If there is a new political structure, what will it look like? Can it see humanity through the hard times to come, when the current old boys at the U.N. assuredly cannot? If so, how?

My answers below are based on the [ OMNISCIENTIFIC COSMOLOGY ], of which I conceived during my 2-month solo camping in Africa more than 30 years ago, and which I published in 2003 in the form of a 454-page book titled [OMNI-SCIENCE and the Human Destiny ] (available at www.Amazon.com) .

And as does the Omniscientific Cosmology, let’s start from the beginning, in this case if not the Big Bang, then the origin, evolution and INTEGRATIVE TRANSCENDENCE of life and civilization on Earth.

About 3 billion years ago, on the early planet Earth, the molecules in the Primordial Soup integrated into Molecular Societies, which transcended into the first single-cell Cellular Organisms. Thus, from non-life, Integrative Transcendence gave rise to life.

About 700 million years ago, the cellular organisms (e.g. amoebae) integrated into Cellular Societies (e.g. corals), which transcended into the first multicellular Metazoan Organisms (e.g. fish). Thus, from the Cellular Level of Life, Integrative Transcendence gave rise to the Metazoan Level of Life.

About 120 million years ago, the Social Metazoan Organisms (e.g. bees, lions) integrated into Animal Societies (bee hives, lion prides), which transcended into the first human-based Citian (city) Organism. Thus, from the Metazoan Level of Life, Integrative Transcendence gave rise to the Citian Level of Life.

About 6,000 years ago, the Citian Organisms integrated into multi-city Communities, which transcended into the first National Organisms (e.g. ancient Greece, ancient Egypt). Thus, from animal societies and tribal cultures, Integrative Transcendence gave rise to civilization.

In 2012, according to the ancient Mayans, the world will end, wiping out life and society on all levels, and, according to modern science, it just might begin to. How? The former includes anything from solar flare to galactic alignment to the Rapture to alien invasion, while the latter includes only one thing – the Methane Time-Bomb.

The Arctic Ocean is now visibly warming up and its effects can be measured in many points.

The Methane Time-Bomb is a “slow bomb”, one that will take decades to spend, but once detonated, it would be all but unstoppable. It would be like releasing an evil genie from a bottle; you cannot stuff him back in, or like opening a Pandora’s box, all hell will break lose.

The evil genie is of course Methane (CH4), a potent greenhouse gas [GHG] released in copious quantities by the cattle industry, and threatening to be released in enormous quantities once the Arctic Ocean warms up enough to melt the permafrost in the subArctic, which currently serve as a super-store-house of solid-state Methane Hydrate by the trillions of tons. Once the Arctic becomes ice-free in the summer, perhaps as early as the summer of 2013, gaseous methane will be released in the billions of tons.

Track 1: Halt the use of combustion technology immediately or soon, and of course replace it with a broad coalition of green technologies including solar, wind, geothermal, wave and tidal, and, Thorium-based (instead of Uranium-based) fission nuclear energy, and fusion nuclear energy if feasible, but NOT including ethanol, a fuel more destructive (of tropical rainforests) than the fossil fuels. The ultimate development of this track is a global electrical SUPERGRID drawing power from all green sources worldwide and equitably distributing the electricity to all nations.

Track 2: Even if we stopped burning the fossil fuels yesterday, the Earth will continue to heat up due to the CO2 already in the atmosphere, for centuries to come. And sooner or later, it will release the Methane genie, though we might have bought us a little time. The ultimate and long term solution is to lower the atmospheric CO2 concentration back down from the current 390ppm to less than 350ppm – no mean task, in fact a mammoth undertaking.

Bear also in mind that the atmospheric carbon concentration increases by 1 ppm every year, meaning that it will be 400ppm come 2020, and that the longer we do nothing, the worse the problem will get, and the more expensive the solution will be. We are talking about major GEO-ENGINEERING here, to recool the planet. The technology is called Atmosphere Carbon Capture and Sequestration (ACCS).

Both Track 1 and Track 2 require enormous funding input beyond the capacity of any single nation, nor would corporations be interested given the lack of immediate profit potential. On the other hand, the nations in the world spends some $1.5 trillion per year in military expenditure. If the nations could learn to trust each other in non-aggression, they could collectively liberate $1 trillion for building the global Supergrid, and the global ACCS.

The military of any nation need fear no layoff, since soldiers can be trained into an Earth Defense Force; and no military manufacturers need fear financial loss, since they can be converted into Supergrid and ACCS manufactureres.

Back to the Omniscientific Cosmology, the Earth is now at the point of having produced the National Organisms, but the National Organisms have not yet integratively transcended into the single, one-and-only, PLANETARY ORGANISM named EARTH.

It is also evident that every time the planet produces a higher level of life, the new organisms of that higher level would have undergone a quantum leap in power. Compare the power of an advanced Cellular organism like an amoeba to that of an advance Metazoan organism, like a human, and the quantum leap becomes more than obvious. If and when the nations integratively transcend into the Planetary Organism Earth, Earth will have undergone yet a higher quantum leap in power, with which she can then heal herself.

MUST SEE ALSO:

Exclusive: The methane time bomb

Melting Arctic Ocean Raises Threat of ‘Methane Time Bomb’

Climate change could be accelerated dramatically by rising levels of methane in the Earth’s atmosphere, scientists will warn today.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: 

Defusing the Methane Greenhouse Time Bomb

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Personal Journeys: transcending the meat habit

BOOKS THAT MATTER  / REVIEWED BY WOLF CLIFTON

“I hold that flesh food is unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it.”-Mahatma Gandhi

EATING ANIMALS, By Jonathan Safran Foer

  • Hardcover: 352 pages
  • WHAT MOST CLEARLY SETS Eating Animals apart from the bulk of animal rights literature is the perspective from which its written – not the firm, impassioned mindset of a longtime activist, but that of a lifelong omnivore engaged in his first thorough exploration of the vegetarian debate. The catalyst for the book’s writing was not any conviction as to the merit (or lack thereof) of a vegetarian lifestyle, but rather the birth of the author’s first son, and the necessity of making responsible dietary choices on his behalf and raising him with a consistent moral framework. As such, it is considerably more balanced than most books on the subject.

    As Foer explains early on, all of his statistics come from the most conservative sources available (he lists his citations at the end of the book), and have been verified by multiple third-party fact-checkers. Even these conservative numbers are often too high to be easily conceptualized, though, a problem Foer remedies by opening every chapter with an illustration. Chapter Five, for instance, opens with the words “influence” and “speechlessness” alternating, in small-font single-spaced print, for five pages on end, an apparent waste of space until I realized, with staggering horror, that every letter on those five pages – 21,000 in total – represents one of the animals the average American will consume in a lifetime.

    Observing that facts take on meaning only when put into a larger ideological framework, the author also delves deeply into the scientific, emotional, and philosophical context that gives them relevance. For example, whereas an animal rights activist may cite studies on the intelligence of animals, and a meat-eater may observe that most domestic animals wouldn’t exist at all if not raised by humans for food, Foer frames these and other talking points in lengthy discussions of topics such as the value of suffering, the relationship between species and individual, and what it means to be a “human” as opposed to an “animal.”

    On nearly every issue, he ultimately comes out on the side of the activist, though the depth of his analysis – and ultimate rebuttal – of meat-eaters’ arguments shows that his desire for balance and fairness is sincere. He even allows farmers and industry executives to defend their positions directly, in their own words, on four separate occasions. Only one of the four is involved in factory farming – the other three are small, independent producers committed to high standards of animal welfare. That Foer gives such a prominent voice to these farmers, who represent such a tiny fraction of the industry – in his own words, “there isn’t enough nonfactory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island and not enough nonfactory pork to serve New York City, let alone the country” – is extremely important. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the issue is not as black-and-white as either vegetarians or factory farmers often like to portray it. On the other, it exposes the limitations of even the best forms of animal agriculture, showing that even the most humanely raised animals are subject to various torments: branding, castration without anesthesia, and eventual slaughter. That these cruelties pale when compared to industry standards only drives home how horrific factory farming really is.

    No such thing as humanely raised meat

    The author covers an enormous body of material, including much with which the average activist, if not the casual reader, will already be well familiar. He also gives significant attention to many more obscure issues. Among these is the topic of seafood, so neglected by the animal rights movement that many self-proclaimed “vegetarians” still regularly consume fish and shellfish. Foer touches on the issue numerous times, both from the perspective of the consumed animals themselves, with reference to studies on the intelligence and social lives of fish, and within a larger environmental context. Regarding “bycatch,” the creatures caught accidentally in commercial fishing operations, he has this to say: “Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.” Other less often discussed topics include “selective omnivorism” of the sort advocated by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the do-it-yourself slaughter which has become increasingly popular in recent years. The former is treated with some respect, though its shortcomings – the scarcity of humanely raised meat, and the difficulty of accommodating it in restaurants or family gatherings – are made quite clear. The latter is soundly condemned as hypocrisy: “Killing an animal oneself is more often than not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It’s always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.”

    Blindness by selective reasoning

    Foer makes his most remarkable observations in addressing the least explored topic of all: why it is that well-meaning people, even after learning the facts of where meat comes from, continue to eat it. Many a vegetarian, myself included, have puzzled over this bizarre phenomenon, and in Eating Animals Foer finally offers a satisfying answer. He opens the book with an anecdote about his grandmother, who in his childhood would feed him chicken and carrots and tell him stories about her escape from the Holocaust during WWII. At the time, he believed her to be the greatest chef who ever lived, and even as an adult confesses that “her chicken and carrots probably was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how it was prepared, or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious because we believed it was delicious. Š Her culinary prowess was one of our family’s primal stories.” Stories, he maintains, are what sustain us through life, and it is our ability to place events and facts into a narrative that gives meaning to our existence. Stories may even prove more important than life itself, as another story about his grandmother illustrates. While fleeing the Nazis, close to starvation, she was assisted by a Russian farmer, who gave her a piece of pork to eat. Because it was not kosher, she refused it. When Foer asked why she wouldn’t eat it to save her life, she replied, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing left to save.”

    By exposing the profound significance that food can assume in our emotional lives, Foer offers a powerful insight into the psychology of meat-eating, which will hopefully equip activists in more effectively combating it. It helps to explain the persistence of traditions such as the Thanksgiving turkey, and why even some vegetarians are compelled to partake of meat on that holiday. Potentially, it could be applied to other forms of animal cruelty besides meat consumption, such as bullfighting, sport hunting, and animal sacrifice. In recognizing the full symbolic importance of meat, the task of changing human attitudes towards animals may appear even more daunting than ever, but Foer believes that change is possible. We are not just characters in a story, we are its authors as well. Near the end of the book, he writes, “If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That’s the truest version of our story of eating animals.” He closes the chapter with a challenge: “Can we tell a new story?”
    Although much of its content is highly distressing, as is inevitably the case with serious animal rights literature, Eating Animals is nonetheless an immense pleasure to read. It is an exquisitely written, highly comprehensive, relatively balanced, and incredibly compelling work, and among the most nearly perfect books I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. I wholly and enthusiastically recommend it, both to vegetarians and, far more importantly, to omnivores struggling with the ethical ramifications of their diet.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    A young man profoundly concerned with issues of justice and compassion, Wolf Clifton is currently studying religion, film and astronomy at Vanderbit U.  He can be reached at wolf.g.clifton@vanderbilt.edu

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Youth sentenced to years in jail for posting Facebook notices during British riots

By Robert Stevens, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization
18 August 2011

The British judicial repression shows the class nature of bourgeois rule and how the law is instantly changed—in mid-play if necessary— to protect the system. Non-impartial role of the state made clear to all. 

The British Guardian says, "Too heavily punished? Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan and Jordan Blackshaw."

The state clampdown against working class youth in Britain continues unabated. On Tuesday, crown court judges in England handed down long jail sentences to two young men for posting comments on Facebook.

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, were not involved in any disturbances. But at Chester Crown Court they were sentenced to four years imprisonment for “intentionally encouraging another to assist the commission of an indictable offence under sections 44 and 46 of the Serious Crime Act 2007”.

Blackshaw was arrested after he set up a Facebook “event” called “Smash Down in Northwich Town”. The court was told that Blackshaw’s event requested that people meet at a local McDonald’s restaurant for the purpose of rioting.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) claimed that notice of the event sparked a wave of panic in Northwich, even though there was no evidence for this assertion and there were no disturbances in the town.

It emerged that police were following Facebook pages when they saw Blackshaw’s posting and went to the restaurant, where he was arrested.

Sutcliffe-Keenan created a Facebook page titled “The Warrington Riots” on August 9. It was claimed that this page also “caused a very real panic”, although again no disturbances resulted from the posting. Sutcliffe-Keenan himself removed the page within 24 hours.

In sentencing Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan, Judge Elgan Edwards invoked the right-wing hysteria against “criminality” that has been whipped up by the government, all of the parliamentary parties, the police and the media. Edwards described Blackshaw as “evil” and added, “This happened at a time when collective insanity gripped the nation. Your conduct was quite disgraceful and the title of the message you posted on Facebook chills the blood”.

The fate of Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan underscores the degree to which the government, judiciary and police are dispensing with democratic norms. The two were arrested on August 9. They have been tried and subjected to vindictive sentences in just one week, without any genuine regard for due process.

Since the riots began on August 6, more than 2,770 people have been arrested in an unprecedented police dragnet. Over 1,200 of these have already been brought before the courts. Of these, some 64 percent have been remanded into custody. Last year’s remand rate at magistrates’ courts for “serious offences” was 10 percent.

In London alone, 1,733 arrests have been made, with 1,005 people now charged. Many have been sentenced to jail for up to six months for petty offences. Many others have been referred to the crown courts, which can impose up to 10 years imprisonment for rioting.

A 22-year-old man appeared before a magistrates’ court in Manchester charged with stealing two scoops of ice cream and a cone from a patisserie during disturbances in the city. He has been referred to crown court after the judge warned, “I have a public duty to deal swiftly and harshly with matters of this nature”.

These kangaroo courts make a mockery of an “independent” judiciary. Imprisoning four defendants to sentences of between 16 months and two years at Manchester Crown Court, Judge Andrew Gilbart QC said that “the offences of the night of 9 August … takes them completely outside the usual context of criminality. … For those reasons, I consider that the sentencing guidelines for specific offences are of much less weight in the context of the current case and can properly be departed from.”

Two of the victims of his sentencing had not stolen anything; one was convicted of handling stolen goods and the other of “theft by finding”.

The Daily Mail reported that Gilbart “unveiled a sliding scale of tariffs under which riot leaders will be jailed for at least eight years, burglars who broke into shops to steal for between four and seven years, and arsonists between three and seven years. Even those who claimed they found stolen goods abandoned on the street should be jailed for up to four years”.

Such sentences are transparently political. They are being handed down under government instruction and their aim is to intimidate workers and young people.

The chair of Camberwell Green magistrates’ court in London, Novello Noades, said, “Our directive [from Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service] for anyone involved in the rioting is a custodial sentence”.

Noades made the comment as she jailed a father of three for six months. The man was imprisoned even though he had merely found looted goods in rubbish bins near his home. She later said she didn’t mean to use the term “directive”.

On Tuesday, acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner Tim Godwin told Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee that he and other senior officers had discussed shutting down Twitter “a few times”.

“I contemplated seeking the authority to switch it off”, Godwin said. “The legality of that is very questionable”. Nevertheless, he said closing down social messaging sites “is something we are pursuing as part of our investigative strategy”.

The fact that the police were discussing such illegal steps aroused barely a flicker of concern from the parliamentary committee. The committee’s chair, Labour MP Keith Vaz, said social media had allowed “people to turn up at very short notice to demonstrate and riot”. He added, “We should look at whether we should give power to the police to order social media sites to behave in a certain way”.

Reports have emerged that police broke into the encrypted BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) on the mobile phones of people arrested during the first day of the riots. According to the Guardian, police “were able to use details gained from the seized phones to give officers ‘live time monitoring’ of BBM and also Twitter”.

Everything points to the police implementing a well planned operation almost immediately after the riots began on August 6. The disturbances were triggered by a police attack on a peaceful protest over the murder of 29-year-old Mark Duggan, who was shot twice by police firearms officers on August 4.

The government also recruited the intelligence service MI5 and the giant eavesdropping national security centre GCHQ to access electronic communications. MI5 is officially tasked with protecting national security from espionage and terrorist threats, including “weapons of mass destruction”. The fact that working class youth are now considered a threat to national security reveals the acute state of class relations in Britain.

Prime Minister David Cameron praised the sentences against Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan as “very good”.

“What happened on our streets was absolutely appalling behaviour and to send a very clear message that it’s wrong and won’t be tolerated is what the criminal justice system should be doing”, he said.

Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan did not do anything “on our streets”. This is no matter for Britain’s ruling elite, which is now seizing on the disturbances to censor social media networks.

The hypocrisy and double standard are brazen. When Twitter and similar sites are used in other countries to organise protests against governments deemed antagonistic to British imperialist interests, such as Iran, the British government and media hail the power of the new communications tools and denounce the efforts to suppress their use. When the same sites are used to express the hostility of British workers and youth to the government at home, they are immediately subjected to a clampdown.

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